


The Last Romantics

by floorcoaster



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2013-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-03 15:13:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1071957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/floorcoaster/pseuds/floorcoaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She keeps a candle burning, waiting, hoping.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Romantics

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you SO much to whoever nominated me for Advent this year. I love this fest, it's basically the only thing that gets me writing Dramione, and I so enjoy flexing my writing muscles, even just a little bit. So thank you. Knowing that someone STILL wants me to write is the best Christmas present I could ever receive.
> 
> Harry Potter and his world belong to JK Rowling. I write to learn, not make money.

She focuses on the scrape of the match head across the rough, flinty edge of the box, the split-second of silence followed by the bursting birth of a new flame. She stares at it, watching it dance shadows on the wall. 

Waits until the stick is half burned, the way her heart feels, a lump of smoldering ash. 

Then, she dutifully lights a red candle, shakes her hand until the tiny light dies.

She’s been lighting a candle, one after another—a light always burning, welcoming, bidding come—for almost two years. 

**Two years.**

Two years since Draco Malfoy had been taken prisoner by the Dark side.  
Two years, two months since she decided to try, to risk, to admit to herself that she’d fallen for him.  
Two years, seven months since he confessed to have fallen for her.  
Three years, six months since he went to the Order.

Two weeks, 3 days until she would need to finally mourn him and attempt to unpeel his existence from her heart. To move on, put him behind her, get back in the game, plenty of fish—he’s gone, Hermione, just admit it.

Until then, until she hangs a new calendar on the wall, she will continue lighting this candle, living in this old house, and hoping beyond hope that he finds his way home.

*o*o*o*

The first thing Draco notices is the smell of wet leaves. This sensation is quickly joined by the sound of snow falling gently to the ground. Next, he feels cold, suddenly frozen, icy veins cold. It takes every ounce of strength and willpower to move, to stand, to see and then take in everything around him.

He wonders why he’s lying on the ground during a snowfall. He wonders why his mouth tastes like blood. He wonders why he’s holding a stick so tightly his knuckles are white and he’s dug nail prints into his palms. It’s an elaborately carved stick, but a stick, nonetheless. He drops it into the piling snow and moves. 

Draco Malfoy has no memory of his life, but the memories remain, tucked away inside the folds of his mind. They are strong. They are insistent, pervasive. And so, they come to him at night, fantastical dreams of bubbling cauldrons, roaring dragons, moving staircases, and flying brooms. 

Yet, there are also terrifying dreams: of horrid cackling, red-slit eyes, snakes everywhere… and pain, such pain.

He tries not to sleep. But even that doesn’t always help. And so he self-medicates to drive away the demons.

There is one image that breaks through all the others. A girl, her face masked by a riot of curly-brown hair. She sits by a window, lighting a candle. Just when he thinks he knows her—every time, without fail—he wakes up.

Sometimes, when he’s had too much to drink, he wakes up in strange places. Once, he found himself sitting on the ground between platforms nine and ten at King’s Cross Station, staring at a brick column. A few times, he woke up outside of an old, stuck-in-the-past department store. No one ever stopped to browse or even glanced at the window, but more than once, he found he couldn’t take his eyes off one certain mannequin wearing a hideous brown and orange dress. 

Usually, he wakes up outside an abandoned, decrepit old pub. He never sees anyone coming or going, but there are times when he thinks he can hear voices inside. No one who walks past the pub seems to even notice the place. Draco kept trying to work up the nerve to walk in. After all, ale is ale. But every time he puts his hand on the knob, he blacks out. 

One time, though—the last time—he fell forward, his head thudding against the door. 

And that is how Draco Malfoy fell face first back into the magical world.

*o*

Here is what happened to the Malfoy heir: in the latter half of the war, he switched sides, turning himself in to the Order of the Phoenix. To make a long and tedious story short, he turned spy, fell for the brightest witch of his age, and then, just before she intended to tell him she’d likewise fallen for him, he was abducted by his aunt Bellatrix, pummeled a bit, and then dropped in London in the middle of a winter snowstorm. Before leaving him, she cast an amnesia spell on him so that he would not remember his magical heritage or anything about his life. Not only that, but she cursed him so that, if he ever neared the magical world, he would pass out and forget all over again. She thought it more damaging to his parents that they know he was alive but not be able to find him. She had many grand plans of torturing Draco’s parents with the knowledge that not only could she and she alone locate him but that she absolutely refused to.

The war ended shortly after, and neither Bellatrix nor Draco’s parents survived it. Hermione did, however, and she continued a tradition she had started whilst getting to know and subsequently falling for young Malfoy. Whenever he was on a mission, she’d light a candle in her window and not blow it out until he returned.

*o*

Tom, the barkeep, does not recognize Draco for who he is. The young man had been living on the street for a year and a half, scraping for food, stealing for bread. His hair is long, unkempt, dirty, and he’s grown a scraggly beard. His signature bright blond hair is masked by grime and mud.

All Tom knows is that not just anybody could fall into the Leaky Cauldron, and so he pulls Draco fully in. When he does so, some of Bellatrix’ curse is broken. Draco can now freely come and go between the two worlds, but nothing more. 

Draco, however, is in no position to go anywhere. Tom sets him up in a room for the night, anxious to collect for his troubles in the morning. 

But Draco is not in the habit of staying asleep. He wakes in the middle of the night and makes his way to Diagon Alley, through no active part of his own. Still quite disoriented from never quite being sober, he stumbles behind a couple going through the portal. 

Then, he promptly falls asleep again in the bushes.

When he wakes, he thinks his dreams have come true, in quite the literal sense. Before him are scenes he’d seen behind closed lids for the past eighteen months. But Draco Malfoy is still cursed, and so, instead of wandering the streets of London with nowhere to call home, he now wanders through Diagon Alley, completely lost in a world he’d grown up in. 

He feels at peace amongst the magical population, though he can’t say why. If you were to ask him, he would say that he’s finally just had one too many, knocked his head, fallen in a ditch, and died. Without brushing his teeth first.

The curse that Bellatrix had cast is wrecking havoc with Draco’s equilibrium and every other sense. Draco doesn’t know up from down, left from right. He always sees at least two of everything, usually three. 

Eventually, someone gets tired of seeing a homeless beggar stumbling through the usually pristine alley and tries to talk to him. This friendly citizen is named Ethyl Baumgartner, and she immediately recognizes the symptoms of one being cursed out of his mind. The good witch that she is, Ethyl escorts Draco back out of Diagon Alley, through London, to St. Mungo’s, which Draco only recognizes as that department store with the ugly dress still in the window.

Draco is admitted to the hospital and cleaned up. His hair is cut to shoulder length, his beard trimmed. Still, no one recognizes him, and he has no memory of anything around him. In general, however, he feels much more calm and at peace in the wizarding world, in the presence of spells and magic and wrist movements, than he ever had in Muggle London. Television, flashing lights, cellular towers, automobiles made Draco extremely uncomfortable. 

Eventually, Draco is moved to the long-term care ward, where special Healers work to try and reverse the memory problems. 

Because he is sleeping now—sometimes forcibly—Draco’s dreams return in full force. When they are good dreams, he sleeps peacefully. When they aren’t, it often requires a team of workers to hold him down and give him something to push his mind past the dreams. 

And still, always the candle in the window and the curly brown hair.

When he’s been at the hospital for a few months, the memory work begins to have some effect. Once he remembers that he is a wizard, things come more quickly. 

Memories are such intricate things. The memory of a single hour requires an uncountable amount of storage of unconnected events, things, smells, sights, places, people. Draco still has many holes in his memories and suffers headaches on a constant basis. There is no single moment where everything snaps back into place. 

The things Draco most wants to remember are what happened to him and who the girl is he keeps seeing. For some reason, these memories appear the most elusive.

But one late December evening, he suddenly remembers a house. An old one. In a strange place. He doesn’t know why it is strange, just that it doesn’t quite… fit. The memories of the house include how to get there, and so, he packs his meager belongings and leaves the hospital.

*o*o*o*

He focuses on the crunch of snow beneath his feet, the way the snow gives at first until becoming compressed, the force it exerts on his shoes. One foot in front of the other, walking where only part of his mind knows to go, trusting the memory muscle to get him there.

If he thinks about it, he’ll forget.

Finally, he arrives at Grimmauld Place, looks for the numbers. Nine, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Number twelve doesn’t seem to fit, just as he’s sort of remembered. 

He stares at the door, wondering what on earth he should do next, pulls the sack they gave him at the hospital closer to his body. 

He gives himself two minutes. 

**Two minutes.**

It’s been six months since he almost broke his nose on the floor of the Leaky Cauldron.  
Four months since Ethyl herded him to St. Mungo’s.  
Two months since he remembered that he was a wizard.  
Two weeks since he saw in his mind a flash of brown eyes that he knew belonged to the girl in the window.  
Two minutes until he knocked on that door, hoping against hope to find an answer. Any answer. 

And then…

A flame burst to life in a window, a candle was lit, and a head turned toward the street, staring right where he stood, rooted to the spot.

**Author's Note:**

>  **A/N:** Many thanks to my last-minute beta, dormiensa. Really, I'm so very appreciative! My prompt this yeas was _candles_. I realized, after reading the first few postings, that my story doesn't even mention Christmas. So, sorry about that! I went back and looked at it, trying to fit it in somehow, but it just didn't work.  
>  **Credits:** Story title taken from a poem by Sylvia Plath, "Candles."


End file.
